Moments
by Richie S
Summary: Joanna contemplates her life before and after the Institute and her father.


Whenever I have a free moment I like to wonder. Wonder where in the course of the last 2 to 3 years a bunch of over-bearing, arrogant assholes became friends. Good friends once you got down to it. Ironically the reason for this dramatic transformation was my fault.

I supposed it started from as far back as I can remember I was an army brat. Correction my dad was not in the army, he was in the marines though and he was honorably discharged before I was born. Then he became a bail-enforcement agent or in lay terms a bounty hunter. First let me explain something about my dad. Me and dad were uber close and our relationship was all a matter of love. If someone had a problem with me they had a problem with him and whoever had a problem with him had a problem with me, period. I loved him and he me. There was nothing fluffy or Hallmark about this, it was just the way things were.

Getting back to my youth, Dad raised me in bounty hunting and quite frankly a field I will be forever greatly I grew up in. I am forever grateful of this because of the unorthodoxy that surrounds bounty-hunting. Back then and to a much lesser extent now I was as reckless as hell. And because dad taught me self-reliance not to mention various skills that come in handy while bounty-hunting I could usually get out of any trouble I got myself into, this also led to my titanic ego whenever I was in trouble I magically transformed and suddenly became 7'4", bullet-proof and invisible. At times I wonder how I got the wonderful personality combination of reckless/arrogant.

Perhaps since my mother died log before I could remember which led to me and dad being so tight. I suppose that's ironic due to the fact that ever since the 20th century until now divorce rates have skyrocketed to the point at now 70 percent of marriages fail with the usual result being that a child's father is a secondary or non-existent player in the child's life as opposed to the ever increasing matriarchy. Perhaps it was reversal, being raised by my father and therefore not having a strong female role model is what made me such an arrogant and competitive and downright reckless individual. Of course I'm not much into psychoanalytic bullshit, I am just the way I am and have no clue nor do I ever care to know how not having a mother effected my psychiatric development. Radical feminism may have a field day with me but again I am who I am and feel no need to explain to meet some egg-head's guidelines whatever they may be.

Ah, yes getting back to the assholes, aka the Carrington Institute staff. It all started when me and dad got into that whole dataDyne mess. I was 20 and my recent string of successes had fueled my ego and my skills to gargantuan proportions. Then the day came. The day I wanted to bust that damn hyper corporation wide open and reveal its deepest, darkest secrets a la a trashy tabloid. Of course dad resisted. It wasn't that he was protective it was that he was just so… _conservative_. We had both been in harm's way a number of times but during our strategy session on datayDyne dad always wanted to hold back and wait, be cautious, be pensive etc. I on the other hand wanted to go in with proverbial guns blazing, clean house and generally deliver sweet vigilante style justice to the satanic behemoth that was dataDyne. I love my father but my patience with him was wearing thin our argument over tactics deteriorated. It became more aggressive, actual arguments began to border on insults, eventually we started shouting and the argument became a fight. Having a fairly intimate knowledge of Chicago I'm sure the late trash mogul Jerry Springer would have been impressed by the volume of voices as well as the anger in them. The fight blurred together except for the end. I told him he was a warped, frustrated, old man who if it wasn't for me, the young up and comer he would be a decrepit, elderly has-been with nothing going for him.

That is when he slapped me. It wasn't hard and it was barely painful. Except that my father had never done it before. Oh sure, dad had disciplined me before, I was no brat! But it was never with his hands, always with words. Then he inflicted the most pain I had ever felt in my life with his following words. "I'm ashamed of you. You'll never amount to anything." Then he stormed off. I stood there but not for long. Soon I was sitting balling my eyes out. I loved dad and hearing that from him, I wish he had hit me in the face with a brick; it would have been less painful. After a few minutes of sobbing I decided that I was going to throw caution to the wind, take on dataDyne and take my success and shove it up my dad's ass. And guess what? I did. And guess what? It did not matter.

I went and loaded up with enough guns and gadgets like some kind of sordid cross between Rambo and James Bond. Then to make a long story short I proceeded to the mission zone and began the mission. All went well until the time came for stealth to end and all combat to begin. At first I did well, very well. Then the tide slowly turned, more and more enemies appeared and I was slowly overwhelmed. Oh, I had been beaten before. I had gotten into fights that I lost and had been outdone on occasion by other bail-enforcers, but this was different. My ass was getting kicked and we all know dataDyne plays for keeps. I was dead and their was not a damn thing I could do about it except take as many of them with me as I could and await the inevitable and realize that dad was right and that I would die with a riff between us.

That is when it happened. Dad showed up in all his glory. He was decked out the same way I was and was employing the very same tactics that I had favored during out argument before. With the two of us combined we were able to take the enemy on and have a fighting chance. I do not know how long we fought for but in the end we were so close to victory. Check that, not victory but survival. We would live to fight another day and then bring dataDyne down. There were but a handful of guards left. We were mopping up and almost ready to leave. That's when it happened; a stray bullet from a guard penetrated dad's defenses and wounded him, badly. Blinded with rage I immediately killed the bastard who fired the shot. With equal rage I wiped out the rest of the guard and aided my fallen father in our escape. When we were in the clear I hit the panic button that summons EMS units and immediately attempted battle-field first aid. Things were not good; the bullet had ricocheted inside him and caused major damage. Objectively he was dying and their was not a thing to be done but as dad I knew he must survive. I immediately did all that I could and more. We both begged for each other's forgiveness for what we had done, we both exchanged professions of love and we both balled. Then EMS showed up and it was out of my hands.

What happened next was a blur. When things became permanently unburned I was in our apartment doing two things. I was holding dad's urn and I was tasting the barrel of my own Falcon wondering if life was even worth living. Granted I knew dad would have wanted me to keep fighting but at that point that did not mean a whole lot. I know it should have but I cannot explain why it did not, it was like the fundamental rules of reality had changed. As for those specific changes, quite frankly if you've never been suicidal I don't think you will never understand. After a few hours of tasting my Falcon and trying to find the nerve to pull the trigger like I have done so many times before to so many others. During this the phone rang, granted I did not give a shit, so I did not answer. Naturally the answering machine picked it up and the message was from the Carrington Institute, actually it was from Carrington himself. "Ms. Dark" he began, "I know what it is like to lose a father" at this I raised my Falcon at the answering machine in anger about to destroy it because of what had been said. "but I will not pretend to sympathies with you." I paused for a moment. "What I am offering you is a shot at revenge. A chance to avenge your father and bring some measure of justice to the world by helping to bring down dataDyne. You know contact number and I know your skills, together we can bring this monster down. I am confident in our partnership." Their was a brief pause and Carrington quickly ended the call. I sat there for a little while longer, staring at my Falcon and weighing the option of revenge against suicide. The anger against dataDyne slowly grew. In the course of a few minutes I became furious, more furious than I had ever been in my life. I set my father's ashes aside and threw my Falcon across the room, I was so angry I cannot remember if it fired or not. The next thing I knew the apartment was trashed. I had made up my mind. I would live for revenge and join the Carrington Institute.

There it was two years I began at the Carrington Institute determined to destroy dataDyne and the potent force of my anger fueled my already great natural talent. I was determined to succeed at everything and I did. Except for the social aspect of things. I was cold and remote and personally disliked my fellow Institute staff and thought that the feeling was mutual. The word "asshole" quickly came to mind when I tried describing my co-workers to myself and I would not be surprised if the word "bitch" was used to describe me behind my back. But dislike soon blossomed into mutual respect. Everyone at the Institute was a consummate professional as skilled in their fields as I was in mine. Despite our personal feelings I worked well everyone and eventually I came to admire them and likewise was admired by them. Then it eventually happened. Over the course of my few years at the Institute that admiration grew into something more. It became friendship. While I could not identify a specific threshold moment where I went from disliking them to liking them, I could not fight the way that I felt; I genuinely liked and was liked by my coworkers. Hell, with the people I work with on a daily basis I've actually gotten really close and we have become almost like family. And the weirdest thing is that I cannot point out a specific moment during which my mind changed it's classification of them from asshole to friend, the change over time was just too gradual. Hell, Daniel is like a second-father, the daily staff are like siblings and agent Jonathon… well when I got here I hated him most of all and found him completely repelling. But lately whenever I see him in the gym for a workout I get well… a little aroused. (I can't believe I just admitted that!)

After dad died all I could think about was dying and then all I could think about was revenge but now, to actually have friends and actually be accepted, it I something I haven't felt since dad died. Comfort. For I know one day I will bring down dataDyne and then my reason for living will be gone and I will need a new reason, a reason other than revenge. I do not know what that reason will be I do now that when I search for it, I will not be searching alone.


End file.
